Building a Ray Tracer ⚡️, ☀️ Solar Fridges ❄️, WebAssembly and Elm Starters

News

Eric Mellino made a Portable CPU/GPU ray tracer with C#, and yes it is as cool as it sounds. Ray tracing is a rendering technique that traces the photon paths from the light sources for each pixel, and calculates the pixel’s state. Ray tracing is capable of photo realistic rendering. Take a look at the code or read about how it works and how he made it happen.

Fredrik Christenson discusses what makes a professional programmer and differences between a professional and an amateur. His primary concern is giving early programmers realistic expectations regarding what it takes to be a true professional, and suggests that the true time required is around three to four years - roughly equivalent to a typical higher-education degree length. Fredrik shames ponzi scheme programs that have helped influence this type of thinking. "[Programming] doesn’t require you to be a super genius, but it does take more time than something that is not higher level education."

Tom Ross has taken content fingerprinting to the next level to find a leaker with JavaScript. He was able to extract the username from fingerprinted text of a user who logged into to a private forum he was sharing with friends for competitive gaming. Try out the demo or take a look at the code .

Live data straight from a solar-powered fridge, courtesy of a Haskell program. Joey Hess is collecting data like kWH generated, temperature, and hours running from his solar-powered fridge and displaying it live in real time. Read how he did it, or take a look at the latest git commits . It is only version 0.1 so expect big things from this project.

Been hearing a lot about WebAssembly, but not sure where to start? Casper Beyer has got you covered. Casper discusses exactly what WebAssembly is, shows a hello world app and then shows how to start building a neat ‘fantasy console’.

Azer Koçulu has crafted a Hitchhiker’s Guide to Elm. The guide starts with a simple explanation of what Elm is. Followed by basic commands / syntax in the language and then jumps into building two example apps. If you are curious what makes Elm different than other languages, this is probably a good place to start.

Fred Hebert has curated a thread of ‘honest programming books’. From Libertarian Programming, to Fred’s own book ‘Please Use my Language’, enjoy browsing through a couple solid (honest) programming book covers.

Time to speed up OH-MY-ZSH. If you’ve noticed a slow shell startup while using OH-MY-ZSH go through JonLuca’s tutorial on how he timed his shell start up, and then made it faster . This is a really neat way to get a little bit more comfortable with ZSH, and he provides a long list of external resources at the end which were helpful to him in the process.

Matthias Endler’s piece ‘Ten Years of Vim’ discusses best learning practices for vim and how vim relates to workflow. Matthias argues that it's not just about memorizing commands, but actually improving your workflow. Matthias talks about "The Zen of Vim", which he thinks is Vim’s central focus on editing code instead of writing new code.

Today's issue of Inside Dev was hand-crafted for you by the team at www.DailyDrip.com , where you can get daily videos on emerging software development tools, techniques, and patterns.